Life according
to Brown Dog

By david l. ulin
mcclatchy-tribune

Published: December 29, 2013;Last modified: December 29, 2013 05:00AM

Jim Harrison introduced the character Brown Dog in his 1990 book “The Woman Lit by Fireflies,” a collection of novellas. The novella is a favored form of his — and of mine — and it seems ideally suited to the misadventures of this shambling savant, a middle-aged half-breed from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula who is driven less by intention than by impulse but manages to move forward all the same.

“I have my own theories about what people think of as the future,” Brown Dog notes. “Imagine yourself lying in bed, sleeping and dreaming of things people dream of, say fish, death, being attacked, diving to the bottom of the ocean, the world exploding, the underside of trees. . . . It makes the world seem blurred and huge. Then you wake up and you’re just B.D. in a ten-dollar war surplus sleeping bag in a cold cabin.”

Harrison’s new book, “Brown Dog” — his 36th — gathers the five novellas he has published about the character and adds a new one as a coda, creating a novel in installments that traces the arc of Brown Dog’s life.

Beginning with his discovery of a perfectly preserved dead Indian in the freezing waters of Lake Superior and ending with an unexpected reconciliation, it is a book about family, about place, about what matters and what will never matter, about the rigors of a changing world.

For Brown Dog, who has never had a straight job, who measures every expense by its equivalent in six-packs, haphazardness is all there is. “He was not under the illusion,” Harrison explains, “that most of us are that he was in control, that he was in the driver’s seat, as they say. . . . His last hope was to get home and have a life that the ancient Confucians thought was the best life, one in which nothing much happened.”

It’s a challenge, of course, to write fiction that intentionally meanders; sooner or later, every story has to find its point. Harrison, however, pulls it off because of the authority with which he frames the character.